Truth Bomb Tuesday: Where did these patterns come from anyway?
Why do we get stuck in behavioural patterns that don’t serve us?
Maybe you grew up in a household where money was always a drama, and now you tighten up and get a shame response every time we talk about money.
Or maybe you grew up in a household where you never made a proper secure connection with your parents, and so you learnt to be very independent, but now you have trouble trusting people and letting people in.
Or maybe you experienced loss and grief at an early age, and you learnt that if you kept yourself busy you could crowd grief out of your experience. But now you’ve been busy for 30 years and you just can’t do it anymore.
Humans are endlessly fascinating like this. We have so many strategies for getting by, and so many ways that these strategies can be learnt and can become entrenched.
But why do we get stuck with strategies that don’t ultimately serve us?
How do we get stuck with strategies that actually prevent us from being happy, actualised or wealthy?
I think the key to understanding this is to recognise that these strategies do actually serve us, if we understand what they’re really trying to do.
Because those strategies aren’t designed to make us happy, actualised or wealthy.
The only thing those strategies seek to serve is survival. Everything else is irrelevant.
In the distant days of our evolutionary history the only goal was getting you through to the next mating season.
So if you learnt that keeping your head down and keeping quiet meant that you are less likely to get thumped with an axe, then you took that on.
And if that kind of repression and keeping yourself small eventually lead to you getting bowel cancer in your 50s, well, who cares? You’d be very lucky to survive that long anyway.
I mean, try explaining to those systems that you don’t want to have a blockage around money anymore. Try explaining to them what money even is.
The point is that we get stuck in certain behavioural patterns and think that something has gone wrong. We must have a wire loose somewhere.
But that’s not true. We get stuck in those patterns because something has gone right. Our evolutionary systems are doing exactly what they were designed to do.
And so the journey isn’t about fixing anything. There’s nothing to ‘fix’.
It’s about consciously choosing the kind of life we want to live, and then consciously choosing the kind of habits and beliefs we need to make that life possible.
It’s a conscious, self-driven process.
Which is why it is just so fascinating.
DB.